[ The etymologies of food words are a path through the history of
how we eat and cook.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A NEW BOOK EXPLORES THE ORIGINS OF COMMON FOOD TERMS — FROM BIALY
TO LIMA BEAN TO BIBIMBAP  
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Kim Severson
March 7, 2023
New York Times
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_ The etymologies of food words are a path through the history of
how we eat and cook. _

Judith Tschann’s new book explores the origins of food words.,
Stella Kalinina for The New York Times

 

Used judiciously, the snappy tidbits of food etymology in “Romaine
Wasn’t Built in a Day
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a new book by the medieval scholar Judith Tschann
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parties.

Say someone shows up in a seersucker
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You could inform her that the British took the word seersucker from
the Hindi _sirsakar,_which itself came from a Persian word meaning
milk and sugar. The smooth stripes are the milk, the bumpy ones the
sugar.

Over the Caesar salad, you could casually mention that the English
word romaine comes from the medieval French _laitue romaine_, or
Roman lettuce, which possibly arrived in France along with the popes
who moved to Avignon from Rome to escape some nasty politics
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the early 1300s.

But here’s a pro tip: When sharing food lore at a meal, it’s easy
to cross the line. Do your friends dipping into a bowl of guacamole
need to know that the word avocado started out as _ahuacatl_,
a Nahuatl [[link removed]] term that
the Aztecs likely used as slang for testicles? Or that soufflé comes
the French word for blown, which stems from the same root as the word
flatulent?

“Language is just so amusing. It has playfulness built into it, and
so does food,” said Dr. Tschann, who taught English and linguistics
for many years at the University of Redlands, in California.

The etymologies of food words, she said, are a path through the
history of how we eat and cook.

Take the word recipe. It’s the imperative form of the Latin
verb _recipere_, which means to receive or take. In Western medieval
and early modern manuscripts, it was used to instruct people how to
take medical prescriptions: “Recipe honey with codfish oil,” for
example. (Rx is a medieval abbreviation of the word.)

Mushroom first appeared in English at the end of the 14th century,
borrowed from the Anglo-French _musherum_ and the Central
French _moisseron._

“The English lexicon is fat from centuries of sucking up words from
other languages,” Dr. Tschann said.

Relish came from the Old French _relaisser, _to release, which came
from the Latin _relaxare_, to relax. The idea is that relish releases
flavor, she said.

And that Starbucks mocha you just ordered? Mocha is a toponym — a
word derived from a place. In this case, Mukha, a port city in Yemen
[[link removed]-] that
handled coffee shipments in the 18th century.

Other toponyms include vichyssoise, from Vichy, France; Tabasco
peppers from the Mexican city; bialy from Bialystok, Poland; and lima
beans from Lima, Peru (not Lima, Ohio).

Conversely, some geographic names started with food. Topeka may derive
from a Dakota word meaning a place for digging potatoes. Chicago comes
from the word for wild leek in Miami-Illinois, another Indigenous
language.

Food and drink names also slip into common use through a process Dr.
Tschann calls “coining,” in which a marketing term becomes a
generic name. Granola, which today refers to a crunchy cereal with
grains and nuts, started as a proprietary name invented by John
Harvey Kellogg
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the late 1800s.

Compounding is another way food language grows. Bibimbap comes from
the Korean _pibim_ (to mix) and _pap_ (rice). The espressotini
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a mix of espresso and vodka.

The martini, by the way, was originally named for Martinez
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California where the drink was developed for Gold Rush miners. At some
point, the Italian vermouth maker Martini & Rossi elbowed its way in
and the “ez” fell away.

Food words are sometimes adopted by pursuits that have nothing to do
with food. Consider the world of computing, which uses a menu to
navigate selections. The first portable computer
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late 1980s, was called a lunchbox. Some developers of the 1990s
programming language claim they called it Java
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of all the coffee they drank while creating it. Cookies, chips, hosts
and servers have all settled nicely into computer language and,
increasingly, social media.

Ms. Tschann is careful to offer caveats when caveats are due. No one
really knows if balls of fried cornmeal batter are called hush puppies
because they were tossed to howling hounds to shut them up, or if pie
came from cooks who observed magpies filling their nests with a
collection of disparate objects.

Was the Reuben
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named for Reuben Kulakofsky, a Nebraska grocer in the 1920s and
’30s? Or was it based on the Reuben’s special
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Arthur Reuben created in 1914 at his New York City delicatessen?

Whatever the case, there are plenty of established facts to hang
one’s dinner napkin on.

Taco is a 20th-century word from Mexican Spanish that means plug or
wad, a reference
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part of an explosive used in silver mining.

Ceviche is likely from Quechuan [[link removed]],
the language of the Inca Empire, where people used the
word _siwichi_ to describe fresh or tender fish.

Barbecue comes from _barbacoa_, a word in the Arawakan language
[[link removed]]of the Caribbean
that describes a wooden frame for sleeping on and drying food.

Fans of the Broadway musical “Six”
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like to know that the Bloody Mary
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after Mary Tudor,
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daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. (As Queen Mary I of
England, she burned Protestants at the stake in an effort to reverse
the Reformation, initiated by her father.) The first recorded use of
Bloody Mary to describe a drink was in 1939, when a reporter for the
New York Herald Tribune declared it “the new pick-me-up.”

The evolution of the word cocktail is one of Dr. Tschann’s favorites
in the book. It comes from the docking of a horse’s tail, which then
stood up like a rooster’s and was referred to as a cock-tail.
Thoroughbred racehorses did not have their tails docked, but if a
horse had docking in its lineage, it was considered of mixed breed. By
the 19th century, cocktails had come to mean mixed drinks.

She is also fond of junket, like the kind of trip a politician might
take. It derives from the French _jonquette_, a sweet made with
boiled milk, which has connections to the medieval
Latin _joncata,_ a type of soft cheese. In English, junket came to
mean sweetened curds.

She can’t pinpoint exactly how cocktail made the leap to a beverage
and junket made the leap from food, though. Language is always
changing, and accounting for semantic evolution is not always
possible.

That can be challenging for Dr. Tschann when she finds herself at a
party.

“When you’re studying the history of food words, people can pepper
you with questions,” she said. “They ask me the etymology of a
word, and I have to think about it way too long. I feel oddly
tongue-tied.”

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New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and
shopping advice_ [[link removed]]_._

Kim Severson is a Southern-based correspondent who covers the nation's
food culture and contributes to NYT Cooking
[[link removed]]. She
has written four books and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer
Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual
harassment. @kimseverson
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* etymology(20201)
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* culinary history
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* culinary books
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